Fourteenth International Conference on e-Learning & Innovative Pedagogies

Abstract

With the increasing presence of ‘datafied’ educational settings across Australia, key components of teachers’ educational practice and their workplace have become quantified. Digital data collected through teachers’ labour in and around the classroom not only links to educational practice, but also to the commercial datafication of teachers’ online persona. Profitable and largely intangible to the teacher, the commercial collection and use of teachers’ data from online activity is being used to predict and nudge behavior. Teachers cannot be described as ‘sleepwalking’ towards the implications of such datafication, as commercial platforms profit from them not waking up. This paper argues that teachers are in fact, in a state of commercial comatose, drugged by strategies employed to keep them ‘asleep’. Drawing on in-depth interview data generated via the [project name withheld], the findings highlight how the new forms of leadership are emerging in educational settings as a result of a growing awareness of such strategies. The paper introduces an emergent theory, called Morpheus Theory, and discusses broader tensions in relation to teachers’ working conditions, rights, and employment when teachers being kept comatose is commercially profitable. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations to address the complex spaces that teachers are now working within, as a result of their workplace including commercial collection and use of their digital data.